Credibility gap

Secretary of State Rice is not distinguishing herself or the Bush administration with her pronoucements regarding the Palestinian Authority. As Martin Peretz of The New Republic notes:

The secretary of state’s description of what was happening on Palestinian ground was so patently not true that almost no one, neither in Israel nor in long-emerging Palestine, could possibly believe that what she said was anything other than fantasy. . .Despite what the American secretary of state said on Saturday in praise of the Abbas government’s efforts at establishing the rule of law in the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians see that she was not describing their reality.